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It’s very annoying, no sooner have the best media sites in the world started putting their content online, than they start to restrict who can watch it. For those of us who travel a lot or spend time in different countries a great advantage has been snatched away. For instance all the best US media sites like Hulu, NBC and Pandora now block everyone who doesn’t connect from the USA. It’s the same across the world, European sites like M6 Replay and the BBC in the UK all block their content from being streamed outside the country.

It’s a practice called Geotargeting, which is being increasingly used across the internet. Basically when you connect to a web site, for instance Hulu – the web site will look up your IP address and see what country it is registered in. If you’re in the US then it will work, outside the US and you’ll get a little apology.

It’s also being used as a form of price discrimination technique, the practice of charging different prices in different countries to maximize their profits. It’s especially galling with online services such as Napster where the end product is almost identical but German users get charged a different price than US ones.

There are of course various ways to bypass these restrictions, they are mainly concerned with connecting through proxy servers. The idea is that when I’m in France, I can connect through a UK proxy server and trick the web page. It actually works very well form many sites, and I’ve been able to watch UK TV abroad without a problem. Many sites are upgrading their detection though and often you’ll need more advanced systems like VPNs to avoid being blocked.